The Walking Dead Season 8 Finale Has A 'Phenomenal And Unusual' Setting

The Walking Dead season 8 will end with a peculiar yet unparalleled bang. 

According to actor Andrew Lincoln, who leads the post-apocalyptic zombie horror show as Rick Grimes, the season 8 finale takes place in a "phenomenal and unusual" setting, where the conflict between his character and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan will come to a chaotic climax.

Lincoln sat down for a chat with Entertainment Weekly to serve up some juicy details about the forthcoming season 8 finale of The Walking Dead, the most intriguing of which was his reveal of a captivating new environment that teems with surprises. 

"The location we shot at was phenomenal and unusual, [and] I hope that it's going to look on screen as good as it felt when we were shooting there," he said. The actor then teased that Walking Dead fans should abandon all preconceptions and assumptions going into the final episode of season 8, and expect for the unexpected to happen. 

Lush aesthetics and a twisty plot aren't the only things viewers have to look forward to in the season 8 finale, however, as sentimentality and a sense of grandeur also await. As Lincoln explained, "I would say this is a smorgasbord. I think you've got everything in this one. It's quite an unusual structure, but it's very emotional, I hope, because that's what I felt [while filming]. It's epic."

The impending finale will also deviate from the series' trend of ending seasons on a cliffhanger. Rather than cutting to the credits at the height of a scene, leaving fans chomping at the bit to know what happens next, the season 8 conclusion will definitively wrap up the Rick-versus-Negan war (also referred to as the All Out War between Rick's Militia and Negan's Saviors) while simultaneously laying the basic groundwork for season 9. 

"It does feel like it completes something," Lincoln said. "But it also does feel that it offers a lot of interesting story arcs for the future, which is quite unusual."

This particular mention of multiple storylines echoes what fellow Walking Dead cast member Norman Reedus, known on screen as the badass Daryl Dixon, previously told EW about the season-ender. "There are about four elements of the finale that are great on their own. There are four things that happen ... and they all go off at once at the same time," Reedus said. "They head in different directions, and they're all individually as good as the next, and they're all very, very satisfying. I like that about it. I like that it's not just one person's story. There are probably four, maybe five, different directions that the [season] could've ended on and it went in all of them. It's very satisfying."

Fans can get caught in the character arc web and dive into the mysterious location Lincoln spoke of when The Walking Dead returns to AMC for its season 8 finale on April 15.